Omodaka: Music is Only Half of the Vision

Sonically, Omodaka (a musician I first heard on last year’s Japan NIte sampler CD) sounds like Bootsy Collins tossed a Game Boy into a blender then fermented the resultant mixture in a disco ball. No seriously, listen to Omodaka’s Cantata No.147 to see what I mean.

This year, Omodaka is returning to Japan Nite and I’d be hard-pressed to be more excited.

But who is Omodaka? According to a description on Japan Nite, the masked figure who performs as “Omodaka” is Soichi Terada, a Japanese composer responsible for most of the Ape Escape video game soundtracks oddly enough. As Omodaka, his band members include a MacBook Pro, a Nintendo DS, a PSP, a Gameboy Color, and various other chiptune toys I can only assume have fallen victim to various levels of hacking to produce the sounds they do. Yet last year’s Japan Nite site has this to say about Omodaka:

Omodaka is the name of the project developed through a trial and error process of mutational fusion of music and motion graphics. So far “Kokiriko Bushi” got 700,000 views at YouTube from 2007, and it will knock over your existing image toward a music video by a beautiful trajectory. From 2008, Omodaka has been playing another trial and error process in live performances.

In other words, the music is only half of the experience. One need only check out the above YouTube clip to see how intertwined Omodaka’s music and beautifully-executed videos are. As for me, I can’t wait to see if Omodaka can pull off a live performance with the intensity of his music videos.

A special thanks to @West_Haven for pointing out how stoked I should be to see Omodaka in 10 days.